


Afterward

by SelenaEstella



Series: Navigation [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aftermath, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Nightmares, Other, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 23:17:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SelenaEstella/pseuds/SelenaEstella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follow-up of 'The Helmsman's Compass'. Mostly fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterward

**Author's Note:**

> This took longer than it should have and is longer than it should be.
> 
> Enjoy!

> Afterward.

You were unconscious for a long time, and it takes even longer for you to fully learn how to separate dreams from reality.

Because you do dream. You dream so vividly that they blend into the waking world, haunting you even after you’ve woken up, stopped screaming, found comfort in Karkat’s arms. You dream that you’re still in the ship, that the rescue was a mirage or hallucination or a deliberate simulation designed by _them_ to test your worth.

Aniken haunts you the most, covered in her ex-kismesis’ blood, grinning down at you with her scissors held high, telling you how far you’ll fly...

But sometimes you dream of before, before they came to your hivestem and stole you away. Those dreams are so ordinary they’re almost memories, maybe some of them are (for there are blank patches in your past, the mundane nothing of your life that you don’t really miss at all, or at least, you shouldn’t), but they are terrible because when you wake up you are blind and crippled and hurting all over and you will never live a normal life again.

Sometimes it isn’t Karkat who’s with you when you wake up, because Karkat has to sleep and eat and deal with stuff that isn’t his broken lover. You are learning, steadily, how to recognize the others by their breathing and their movement. You already know Karkat’s, but gradually you managed to pick up Equius’ – deep breaths; heavy footsteps – Nepeta’s – shallower; she fidgets a lot – Vriska you recognize more by the way she pokes at your mind out of boredom. Thankfully she isn’t often there.

Aradia and Feferi haven’t been around enough for you to learn them (although you’re sure you did know, once).

Occasionally, when you wake without daymares, you can hear them talking over you. Lying still, you half-try to pick up what they’re saying. Your ears are getting sharper the longer you go without your sight, and you know they’re hiding something from you… but it can wait.

It can wait until you can walk.

> =>

'Stand.' Equius' voice booms through the block, stern and steely and commanding. Sollux kneels by your feet, desperately clutching your arms with the hands he can't quite control yet, forcing you to bend almost double. His cheeks are flushed yellow with fever – his body is still trying to reject the metal prosthetics – but Equius had insisted that he start the physiotherapy _now_ , and not wait until it passes.

You think it's a load of hoofbeastshit but you're nothing near a medicincinerator and you pray to the universe that Equius knows what he's doing.

Sollux quivers on the floor, trying desperately to gain control. Your attempt, once again, to pull him to his feet.

Once again, you fail.

Sollux collapses back to the floor with a cry that wrenches your fucking _soul_ , stumps of his legs jarring horribly as his new knees hit the paper-thin carpet. Tears have begun to stream down his cheeks and he's trembling all over with pain and exhaustion.

You kneel down beside him and hold him as tightly as you dare.

'C'mon, Sollux,' you murmur, 'get up. You can do it.'

'I can't,' he chokes. 'It _hurtth!_ ' You look up at Equius, who stands menacingly a few feet away, arms crossed and expression grim. He's doing that goddamn staring thing again and you are starting to get pissed off.

'Stand,' Equius repeats coldly.

'He's _trying_ ,' you snap. 'Don't you think he should wait until his _new fucking limbs_ are actually _attached_ to his body first? Or _at the fucking least_ , when he's stopped running a fucking _fever?!_ ' Equius' lips press into a thinner and thinner line at your repeated 'lewd' words. He holds firm.

'He will not wait another night.' Equius remains adamant. You open your mouth again, preparing to give him a very loud piece of your mind... but Sollux holds you back.

'Jutht... jutht give me a minute,' he pants, making those odd gestures that are meant to instil quiet with the hand that is no longer forming bruises on your arm. There's no way to replace his eyes, so he can't see when Equius actually is, but he can at least aim his words in the right direction.

The two of you give him a minute. Then another one. You can tell that Equius is growing impatient but he doesn't say anything and neither do you.

After three minutes, Sollux has stopped shaking.

After four… Sollux stands.

You have to help him, obviously, and he trembles with the pain and exertion _but he stands_ , not _quite_ on his own yet but his legs and back are straight and his feet are flat on the floor, taking most of his weight.

You practically swell with pride. And there you were thinking his back was _permanently_ in the shape of a candycane!

Sollux grins like an idiot for five whole seconds, before his knees buckle.

' _Fuck!_ '

> =>

'KK,' you say, picking at the cloth cover on the back of your head, 'what _ith_ thith?'

'Don't do that,' Karkat snaps, angry as ever, yanking your new hand away. 'And it's... it's where the wires were, ok?' You stop fiddling with it, because pressure on that area can still stun you with pain and probably always will, and fold your fingers on your lap instead. You love having fingers. You hadn't truly appreciated them until an unfortunate and hellish incident rendered you unable to even use the gaper by yourself, and then getting new hands had become the priority because that shit was brutally mortifying.

'We couldn't get them all out,' Karkat says, stiffly and quietly. 'Well, maybe we could have,' he amends, 'but we didn't want to fuck you up any more than those fucktards already had. So you still have bits of biowire in your pan. Equius might put a cover on if he can be bullied into it, but right now there's a hole in your head.' Karkat pauses and you think you hear him swallow. This stuff disturbs him much more than it disturbs you. 'Just thought you should know,' he mutters.

'It'th fine,' you say casually, because it is. Without the voices clamouring in your skull all the time, a lot of stuff is fine. 'It'll be ok, I think, 'cauthe it'th part of my body anyway. It'll jutht... be there.'

'Yeah,' Karkat agrees, with a calmness that barely covers his anxiety. 'Yeah, that's what we thought.' It won't 'just be there', though... nestling beneath bone and tissue is something that can bridge the gap between minds and machines, can translate the electrical currents in the brain that make thought so that a computer can understand them in under a thousandth of a second.

The _things_ you could _do_... You will never forget the beauty of that final connection, feeling everything in your grasp. You want to talk about it to KK, all the programming, impossible before now, that could now be accomplished near instantaneously...

...But you know that that would scare him. He wants to forget about your time in the ship and wants you to forget as well. He doesn't understand that to do that would be impossible, so to keep the peace, you just don't talk about it.

'Whatever you're thinking about,' Karkat says loudly, 'stop it and go to sleep. Equius is going to subject you to further torture tomorrow and he gets pissed-off if one of us _blinks_ at the wrong moment.'

You do stop, but when you sleep, your dreams are filled with the rushing of data, straight from your remaining memories.

> =>

One of the first things Terezi had done – after everyone could be sure that Sollux wasn’t about to die immediately and Vriska had yelled at you enough to convince you that she wasn’t lying about him not being brain-dead – was unbury a camera from her bag and start taking pictures. Primarily pictures of Sollux.

The smell of blood and singed flesh was enough to make you feel near-constantly sick, so you have no idea how _she_ managed it, but nevertheless, Terezi stayed in the room with you as the dressings were changed and the gory cauterized stumps were revealed, and took pictures of those too.

This had led to a not-very-polite enquiry of _‘Terezi, what the actual **fuck**??_ ’

She hadn’t even paused, just answered immediately: _‘collecting evidence_ ’ in the voice that means ‘a Legislacerator is at work, be quiet’. You had let it be because your life at that point mainly involved keeping Gamzee from flipping his shit (again) and gluing your ass to the floor next to the mat they’d put Sollux on.

Now, however, you are able to focus on a _little_ more. Sollux has had prosthetics for four nights and been walking on them for two, although he still needs crutches. Having a mobile invalid around has proved to be far more problematic than having a (metaphorically) coonridden one, but at least you don’t have to spend half you time worrying that you’ll wake up one night and find that Sollux has not.

Now you just have to worry about him falling down a flight of stairs instead!

But right now, you don’t, because Terezi has Sollux in a chair in front of a computer and is, with truly admirable patience, trying to get a blind person to tell her how to do something to do with coding.

(There are plans in place for her to take him to her hive, see if Terezi’s freakish lusus can teach him the same abilities that it taught her. Terezi is mildly psychic and Sollux is more so, so there doesn’t seem to be much reason as to why it wouldn’t work.)

(But if it ever happens then it’ll in sometime in the future, not yet, so it isn’t worth giving it much thought at the moment.)

‘I need it so that the Empire won’t be able to see it,’ Terezi is explaining, ‘but that normal trolls can easily access it. A password system wouldn’t work because passwords are guessable and also the information mustn’t be _hidden_ , as such. And I don’t know nearly enough about computers to do it alone!’ You sidle over to get a look at the screen. At the moment it’s a wall of coding, but Terezi’s camera is on the desk next to it with a cable leading to the back of the screen, so it’s pretty easy to guess what she’s doing:

She’s trying to make a website about what happened to Sollux.

You wonder if she’s actually _asked_ for his permission or whether she’s just going ahead and using his story and his face because she can.

You watch for a little while. If they know you’re there, they don’t say anything. Terezi is impossibly patient as she guides her friend, reading out each letter and number he types so that there are no mistakes. Sollux knows a keyboard better than he knew he own respiteblock you bet, but he still hasn’t gotten used to his new hands and typing properly is hard for him. You suppose this makes for good practice at the very least.

Whatever he’s doing is far too advanced for you, you realize with slight envy, but pretty soon he’s done all he can and the coding screen is closed.

Behind it is the website itself, very bare and basic, but covered with ugly images and explanatory captions. _Without a quirk_. There are a couple of the remains of the Helmsblock, disgusting wires trailing on the floor and hanging limply from the ceiling, the place where Sollux had been like a gaping wound. The title of the site is ‘The Truth About Helmsmen’. You note, with a wave of relief, that Terezi has, at least, blacked out Sollux’s most identifying features and that the pictures of his face show only his injuries. She isn’t making his identity obvious.

(Questioning her had been dumb, come to think of it, because she _is_ practically a professional Legislacerator after all.)

At the bottom of the page is a single large image: Sollux, in shorts that show the still-swollen flesh where metal meets knee, leaning heavily on crutches, but half-smiling as he faces the camera and _definitely_ alive. The idea seems to be that this story is a happy one. You don’t get to look at it for long, but you think the final caption begins with something like _‘amazingly, the ex-Helmsman survived the ordeal and is currently recovering his health and mobility at a steady rate.’_ Terezi has managed to make his future look so bright... and maybe it will be. But you are far more sceptical and you know that Sollux is too.

He is alive, yes, but so much damage has been done, and Empire will pay for this in more blood than ever.

> =>

Feferi has left. You find out five nights after she did. She had to go back to her lusus before half the planet died… and you were asleep when she came to say goodbye.

It upsets you, because the few times you got to meet her were when she was there instead of Karkat to ensure you didn’t die in your sleep, so the two of you never had any kind of meaningful conversation. There’s so much you should discuss with her too, so many aching feelings and stressful thoughts you need to go over with her.

Aradia isn’t around much either. She and Equius have started a Thing, apparently, and Karkat rages about their flipping to you on an almost regular basis. But she still isn’t around much. You’re not so worried about Aradia though, because unlike Feferi you know that she won’t be bitterly disappointed that you chose another troll as your matesprit…

But you wish you’d been able to properly talk, to have had deep, _meaningful_ conversations with _both_ of them. You’d thought that they’d be as clingy as KK gets, but apparently… you thought wrong.

Making it worse is the fact that you can’t remember what they look like.

Karkat walks in on you quietly crying about it one night. You’re so packed full of misery just because of _life_ by that point that you spill _everything_ before he’s even opened his mouth to ask. The response you get the silence he makes when he has too many words to answer immediately, and then gives up on using at all. For a while the two of you just hug and kiss, and Karkat cheats on Gamzee horribly for a few minutes while you sob into his shoulder.

You’re not sure exactly _what_ the two of you are – hovering between a heart and a diamond, perhaps. If Aradia or Feferi were still around, one of them might become your moirail, but… right now, you only have Karkat, and right now at least, he’s enough.

> =>

Equius’ hive has become disappointingly empty over the weeks and days since the rescue party’s arrival. Feferi and Eridan had had to fuck off pretty quickly because of that stupid monster-lusus they need to feed, but you’d at least _hoped_ that some of the others would stick around for longer.

Nope.

Vriska scuttles back to her hive as soon as she can, which is ok since it’s so close… or it _would_ be _if she came back_ more than _one or twice a week_ in order to _piss you off_. But as soon as Sollux had woken up she was gone. You don’t know _what_ her problem is but she only talks to Tavros over Trollian, which you think is really fucking bitchy of her considering the guy’s fucked-up spine could well have him on crutches _for the rest of his life_.

(There’s a chance of them splitting up over it, you think, which would be horrible of Vriska but exactly like her, ending a relationship because her partner isn’t up to what she calls standard.)

Terezi moves around, occasionally staying at aforementioned spider-troll’s hive (you try not to think about what they get up to together), sometimes in a spare block of Equius’. But you can at least count on her to be reachable when she’s needed.

Gamzee sticks around, although he and Equius have a strict avoidance policy, meaning that the two of them are never in the same block together and you don’t see Gamzee as much as you’d like. He’s probably the reason why Nepeta left too… well, the reason Equius made her leave. He’d probably want Aradia to leave too except she still isn’t well enough to travel cross-country by herself, telekinesis or none.

After the first fortnight of Sollux being back on his feet, the trolls in the building has dwindled to you, him, Tavros, Aradia, Gamzee, Equius himself of course, and occasionally Terezi. Tavros and Aradia will leave as soon as they can, probably.

You think it’s a shame that so many friends left so quickly, or will leave as soon as they can, when this is the first time the majority of your group has met up since that fateful night with Gamzee…

More and more things to worry about seem to be sneaking up on you, only making themselves known when they decide to leap in front of your face and scare the living crap out of you. It frustrates you to no end that you don’t see them coming, but your life is so sheltered right now, so centred around these few people and trying to hold things together, that there isn’t really anything you can do.

(You get the feeling that Terezi is _deliberately_ keeping some stuff form you as well… like just how many hits her site has got, for example. All you know is that it’s been a lot for such a short amount of time, and that is nothing if not suspicious.)

(There seems to be other stuff as well, but you can’t _quite_ place it…)

Then there’s keeping everything from Sollux, which is getting increasingly harder as he gets increasingly mobile and therefore harder to hide from. You don’t _like_ hiding stuff from him either, but he’s hurt and sick and such a wreck already that you don’t want him freaking out over something that’s probably (pleasegodplease) nothing.

Mostly now, you just want him to heal enough so that he can leave with you. The plan is for him to move into your hive, which is big enough for two, and then… wait, you guess. For what, you don’t know. But… _dammit_ , you just can’t shake the feeling that somthing is going to happen.

Just _what_ , you don’t have even a minute sliver of a clue. Your life – up until now at least – has been about as ordinary as a mutant’s can be, and somehow it was _very_ ordinary. Clearly you are a pro at blending in. But now… even if you _could_ have made it into the Fleet without being culled on sight, worked your way up the Threshecutioner ranks to become the leader you were always so totally born to be… would you want it now? Would you want to be involved in, essentially, the same organization that captured and maimed one of the people closest to you?

All you can be sure of, though, is that Sollux couldn’t _possibly_ make it in the Empire unless he was shoved back into those wires. And if he can’t join, then neither can you. The others can suck it – you just won’t be going with them. You’ll hide, or something; there have to be others who made it… You can join them or something… Of if there aren’t any, then do something on your own… maybe start your own place where deserters can hide out…

The future is fucking terrifying and half of you _almost_ wishes that you hadn’t got Sollux back. That you’d left it too long, or that something, _anything_ had prevented the mission from starting in the first place. _All_ of you wishes that Sollux hadn't needed rescuing in the first place. Because then, among other things, you and the rest of your friends would still be ordinary juvenile trolls, definitely not seen storming a starship, certainly without criminal records that'll obstruct your future for the rest of your lives.

You’d just wanted it to be over after the rescue. But no, life obviously has other plans.

> =>

The others are hiding something from you and you are starting to get really pissed off about it.

But no matter how many times you confront them about it, corner whoever you come across first and demand they tell you, or even walk in on them talking about it too each other, _all_ you are met with is a chorus of ‘ _shoosh, Sollux_ ’ or ‘ _it’s alright, Sollux_ ’ or _‘hush, Sollux, you need to rest_ ’.

Then someone, usually KK, comes over and walks you away as if you’re still a hobbling invalid liable to topple over at any moment or trip over on a flat surface.

And it is _really_ _pissing you_ _off_.

You are _damaged_ , you know that, but not _broken_. And you can mostly walk without crutches now and Terezi gave you a cane so you don’t walk into things so much anymore, and you do _not_ need to _rest._  The fever passed ages ago, and you are aren’t in constant pain or even any at all. You are _restless_ , now, and very annoyed and they’re trying to keep you contained.

 _Contained_ , like you were on the ship. And thinking about that makes you feel sick and slightly dizzy, causes fear to start welling up in your chest like an expanding balloon that’s gonna tear you apart from the inside. It only serves to prove them right and you _hate_ it.

You know they’re just trying to help but _fuck_ does it feel obnoxious. Belittling. _Condescending_. If your life is in the balance _again_ , then you have the right to know every fucking detail about it!

It just isn’t _fair_. Even _Tavros_ knows more about this than you! You’re angry – at them, and at yourself. You have a fight with KK. You end up spending your time chucking stuff around with your steadily-recovering psionics (white-black-yellow now, you’re told, what the fuck) until you break something that was apparently important and Equius puts his foot down.

But at least it gets everyone to stop pretending there isn’t a problem, and you finally find out some shit – that the dumb website Terezi had you set up is getting more attention than it should be which is worrying; that Conscription is coming up and they need to work out what the fuck to do and that’s making them edgy; that they’re concerned about everyone’s safety, not just your own, and that they think everyone should split up soon. They're all just very, very _worried_.

Excuses, excuses, _excuses_.

But you swallow your protests… for now. At least they don’t try to hide anything more from you, that’s one good thing. And they stop treating you are if you’re going to shatter at any second… for the most part, at least.

In three nights, you and Karkat will be setting off for his hive. You destroyed your own, you’ve been told, in the fight that ensued when they tried to take you away. You don’t remember any of it, like you don’t remember a lot of things, but you can’t help feeling just a little bit proud that you managed to raze an entire hivestem to the ground in an effort to keep your freedom.

You try to console yourself with the fact that they must’ve killed your lusus long before they found you, and that he probably didn’t die a horrific death via psionic blast.

 _Probably_.

> =>

In two nights, now, you and Sollux will be setting off for your hive. He’s going to live with you for… for a while. Heck, maybe even forever. Not necessarily in your hive, but… be with you. Forever. Travel together, live together…

…die together…?

But that’s (hopefully) way too far in the future to be thinking about now. There are other, more immediate things to worry about. Getting there for one, although that's mostly sorted. And things like... what will the two of you _do_ in your hive? And... will your relationship survive the two of you being in such close proximity all the time? Yeah, sure, your hive is pretty big – something seemed to have told the carpenter droids you were a midblood – but the two of you are assholes to each other even online, so… so you’re kinda scared.

There’s other stuff too. You’re matesprits now, or… something. The two of you flip like it’s going out of style, but you seem pretty safely in the reddish-concupiscent zone, so…

so will the two of you… you know…

_have sex?_

It makes you cringe just thinking about it. You bet you’d be terrible at it. Do you even want it? Does _he_ even want it?

Well, if you’re aiming to dodge the drones, which you might be actually, then it’s far from mandatory. So… maybe you just won’t…

And that wouldn’t disappoint you in the least. No way.

…You predict a very long, very embarrassing talk sometime in the not-too-distant future.

But anyway… getting ready to leave… yeah. You’re a bit sad, actually, because all you can expect is for the group to start splitting again, until everyone goes their completely separate ways, becoming forgotten Trollian contacts and eventually deleted, faces fading from memories, all thoughts of childhood completely forgotten…

…the chances of something similar to Sollux’s misfortune happening again  _skyrocketing_ …

Maybe you’ll do something, try to keep the group together yourself. Hell, you did in the beginning, when everyone was trying to kill one another and half the people didn’t know each other and you were basically the centre point of friendships…

You’ll take it one step at a time. No more leaping in as if victory is guaranteed. You will hope that things work out.

 

**—END—**

**Author's Note:**

> There will be more of this 'verse before it's done. Not sure how much though
> 
> And, as per usual, please inform me of any mistakes =)


End file.
